


As He Lay Dying

by Austennerdita2533



Series: Sometimes Your Touch Feels Like Teeth: Bloodied By Intimacy [6]
Category: The Originals (TV), The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Final moments, People he's loved or fought or lost, Ruminating over life, Sad but touching, Things he's learned or seen, Thinking about the few constants that exist and all those that don't, Why write happy endgame AUs when I can suffer in canon hell instead?, because i'm sorry, did I mention I'm sorry?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-17
Updated: 2019-01-17
Packaged: 2019-10-11 11:32:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17446157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Austennerdita2533/pseuds/Austennerdita2533
Summary: An exploration of Klaus's final thoughts before he dies.





	As He Lay Dying

**Author's Note:**

> ...It just came out.
> 
> (Please don't hate me.)

There are few constants in this world. Though it’s not the most revolutionary thought to be archived, there is none more relevant to a monster who’s currently stretched thin and waning piece-by-piece into the cityscape, his mind drifting off like flecks of paper as he expends his last gulps of borrowed air into the dusk until he disappears. 

Such a stark truth helps to put everything back into perspective. His eyelids can flutter closed with one less regret now because he knows…yes, because he knows…

__

Hardly anything stays the same here.

The sun rises then sets, only never in the same way twice. Opportunity gushes forward when it should trickle in instead. Blood sustains but it too runs dry the longer his fangs cling to the carotid of some nameless human’s neck, that prayer for help already fallen silent on the tip of a person's tongue so it’s gone before the gods can hear it, before they answer it - that is, if there truly are any gods left. 

Perhaps they still exist somewhere, or perhaps they never did? 

Klaus wouldn’t know since humanity’s fickleness deletes old beliefs faster than it ushers in grander ones on spools of sacred carpet. He doesn’t care because a thousand years have lapsed, and he’s never seen one. Never heard from one, either. Not a’once.

It seems only the agents of hell reign here. So either he’s indebted to them, or cursed, or he’s a member of their demon dregs? It doesn’t matter which one it is.

There aren’t many consistencies to be found around him regardless. There’s little to no predictability.

Sometimes, though, a giggle will leave its mark in surprise or in dread, in humor or in cruelty, so that it echoes in his head. Not that such a sound matters at all to the wind carrying it like a letter, because how could it? Why would it? There is no promise it shall arrive again before it’s missed.

Thoughts, cultures, foods, and dreams all disappear in the seconds it takes to sneeze. 

Klaus snaps his fingers and the Berlin Wall tumbles, he whistles and soon the arctic ice thaws into puddles of boiling salt that raise the seas. Applause turns to duels and duels turn to kisses faster than he can flip to the next Shakespearean act and read it all the way through looking for hints, searching for clues that will tell him what to expect at the end.

Another extinct language is continually born to die in ashes that were made to flicker after they fall. Some embers drift away unseen almost as readily as others which remain behind, stacked higher than gray ant hills. Those are the ones built to thrive and condemn all who come into contact with their illegible numerals in the first place. With no ears to listen, and with no hands to point or shoes to kick it along, the fiery wind above delivers a message that may or may not be read by those who remain below, still standing; the lot of them still stuck in a moment they’ll soon learn to forget because they can, because to survive they must march ahead.

Nothing stops in this world, and Klaus knows it. He’s seen it. 

History blows past everything with a wink. He feels the edges spinning away from him day after day - splitting into shreds he’s too slow to catch. 

Transience is a terrible companion for a man like him, for all creatures who ache for perpetuity or an anchor of sorts to brace them against the onslaught, but sometimes that’s all there is. Sometimes fleeting brevity is all one gets.

Rain often washes the paint and charcoal from his fingertips, for example. Snow likely cools the fury he wears curled under his breath before exchanging it for mercy, or the precious little of it he still possesses. Hope can be moister than a stick of gum when he tucks it back against his molars, but it never stays fresh. The taste is sweet at first, then more and more sour when the mint decays into chalk along the inside of his cheek and drills a hole of white through his tongue, the bloody thing a grave which opens deeper with every smile and charming word he speaks. Cementing like an abscessed cavity when he must count his losses in soon-to-be-archaic syllables.

New species of flowers proliferate then wither in his palms over and over again. Leaves green before they redden, orange, yellow, and brown so as to hibernate with all the foes he doesn’t know exist, or hasn’t bested yet. Time becomes nothing more than a string of multiplying paragraphs before it starts to unravel at the seams to make it impossible to remember where one fantasy begins, and another reality ends.

Barely anything Klaus touches remains steady. Most of it crumbles, turning to sawdust in his lap.

“Permanent” is neither a word he applies to many things in this universe nor to an existence which has done its damndest to convince him of its rarity.

His whole life already buoys on a globe of volcanic nothings, does it not? He’s observed how it perches precariously on a bed of tepid somethings which is always moving, always changing in a rhythm that quakes until it turns deaf from the relentless _pound pound pound_ of his fists. The fog billows around mountaintops so the centuries pass in a whisper, or so year after year zooms by in a screech so loud it could perforate the eardrums. Yet each one remains special somehow because it cannot be weathered by anything else except progress. And evolution. And transformation. 

All the lightness and darkness in him blurs while bourbon drowns the red screams that come from another city’s throat. Then from another…and another…and another…ad nauseam. The cycle continuing in squawking refrain because—oh, how the Endless hurts!

Buildings wobble. Cobblestone rots. Parchment crinkles, yellowing at the edges. Lanterns light a crowded alleyway which soon will be filled with rubble, with parking spaces or picnic tables, with ghosts of people he met too long ago to recount every individual face with clarity. 

Hills and meadows and streams, and gravel and grasses and blacktopped streets—they crack beneath his feet the longer he treads on this earth with the continents drifting apart, with the waves crashing back together in a lover’s chaotic embrace because that’s how reunions spark throughout the ages: violently and with no care to preserve the prettiness of the land it once abandoned. And that’s okay. It’s this thirst and hunger for uproar which sprinkles life in destructive beauty. It’s what makes eternal adjustments so spontaneous, so thrilling. 

The truth is Klaus is no stranger to changeability. 

Nor is irregularity a foreign concept to a cunning mind like his that’s forever plotting, always considering new plans for domination or survival, so none of that scares him. Nothing of the erratic sort can, or should, or will unsettle his thoughts enough to drag him from sleep to brew a war which blazes inside of himself because he’s lost a hold of something the world never gave him, something it never promised he could keep. 

He's acknowledged all the while how inconstancy is more likely to web around and throughout him as he continues forward into the eclogues of forever. He’s accepted it, breathed it in like the oxygen he no longer needs. 

So what terrifies him isn’t that variables still abound as they always have but that he’s stumbled over something much more disconcerting in the pulse of his own throat, in the wretched tremble of his knees as a single look or word pins him to the floor on all fours, willingly damned like some besotted fool straight out of every bloody Victorian novel that was ever penned. It’s how he’s unearthed a kind of endurability in himself where none should be yet _is_ in spite of all he knows or may confess in truths yanked from his soul like teeth—and that’s her. She’s the singular point of alarm behind everything.

_Caroline._

She’s equal parts beautiful, infuriating, and fierce. She’s impossible and inescapable, she’s the answer behind every question he’s too afraid to ask out loud. In the forgotten silence, it’s her voice carrying everything he wants to hear: a ‘so long’ sweeter than a peck on the mouth, a slap of reckoning, a right ‘ol pinch in the arse for being disappointing; light that never dims, never burns down to black; charm and kindness with a dash of audacity, the loveliness of an elbow to the gut when it’s warranted, since it often can be with Mikaelsons around; and hope so pure it covers him like heaven’s own golden sleeves.

Klaus was struck by her the moment they met. He continues to be so every minute, hour, year, decade of time he’s fortunate enough to know her. See her. Wondering about feelings she may or may not reciprocate even as a peculiar heaviness starts to settle over his limbs, then robs him of any action except thinking.

Permanent in a way that will never fade, irrational love for her is the one truly indestructible thing he owns. It belongs to him completely. It’s the thumping heart of his entire universe, but then again...so is she.

However, with Death’s fingertips about to shut a lid over him and all they could’ve been one day, a single thought scratches hauntingly through Klaus’s mind; a final pang shoots across his heart before goodbye rots his lungs for keeps because it’s not until then that he realizes: 

_Caroline will never learn how much she’s cherished now, will she?_

____

There are few constants in this world. It’s a fact, not a mystery. Yet while physics may write the laws and answers for everything else, for him, she - only she - is a perpetual feeling.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are always more than appreciated. Thanks so much for reading!
> 
> xx Ashlee Bree


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